Yahoo appoints Marissa Mayer as new CEO

Technology firm Yahoo has appointed leading Google executive Marissa Mayer as its next chief executive. The most recent chief exec, Scott Thompson left the company in May after activist shareholders revealed that he had exaggerated his academic credentials.

Ms Mayer, 37, will become the firm’s third CEO in the space of a year.The appointment of Ms. Mayer, a leading consumer internet executive, signals a renewed focus on product innovation to drive user experience and advertising revenue for one of the world’s largest consumer internet brands, whose leading properties include Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Mobile, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Search.

Mayer has something most of her predecessors have lacked—she’s a trained engineer, with a masters degree in computer science from Stanford. Ross Levinsohn, the interim CEO and apparent frontrunner for the job, was a media guy who hailed from News Corp.

She quit Google yesterday and starts her new job today. Mayer was Google’s first woman engineer. The observers and Wall Street today shocked when Yahoo named Marissa Mayer, longtime Google executive as their new CEO.

The beleaguered company has had four official CEOs over the past five years, and their names—Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, and Scott Thompson. She just 37 years old.